installing joomla /and now/ setting up directory

[Roger]

<snip>
Ugh...  Make special areas (whether they be virtual hosts, or writable 
areas, etc.) outside of the tree.  By way of example, you don't want 
someone to be able to navigate into a virtual host by simply appending 
the directory name to the end of some other website address.
</snip>

OK!.
I set up /public_html in my user space as per 
http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_center/article/fedora-apache-virtual-hosts
/httpd.conf has:
NameVirtualHost *.80

<VirtualHost *.80>
     ServerAdmin webmaster at domain1.ek
     DirectoryIndex index.html
#      DocumentRoot "/home/user/public_html/domain1.ek/public"
       ServerName domain1.ek
     ServerAlias domain1
</VirtualHost>

<Directory "/home/user/public_html/domain1.ek/public">
         AllowOverride All
         Require all granted
     Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
</Directory>
/etc/hosts has:
127.0.0.1        localhost.localdomain localhost
::1        localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
127.0.0.1 domain1.ek


reloaded httpd
navigate in browser to http:domain1.ek  and it downloads the index.html 
to my /Downloads folder then Google finds references to that or any 
other fictitious domain, which I thought could not be real. For example 
yuruy12rb9.erk.uck
localhost/domain1.ek errors out with:
The requested URL /index.php was not found on this server. Why would it 
look for a .php and not the index.html? I created an index.php but error 
remains.....

I am in a bit of a mess here trying to get a grip on what and how.
Thanks
Roger